Are you looking for an effective way to deploy your Kubernetes applications? Then you should consider using Argo CD, a powerful and easy-to-use tool that helps you deploy your applications in a fast, reliable, and efficient way. In this article, we’ll show you how to use Argo CD to deploy your applications to Kubernetes and get your applications up and running in no time.
Setting up Argo CD
First, let’s create a new Argo CD server service by running the following command:
kubectl port-forward svc/argocd-server -n argocd 8080:443
This will create a new service that is accessible on HTTP and HTTPS ports. To access this service, we’ll use kubectl port-forward. Here’s how to forward the service requests to the local port 8080:
kubectl port-forward svc/argocd-server -n argocd 8080:443
Note that we’re also forwarding the service requests to the argocd namespace.
Now that we have access to the Argo CD UI, we’ll need to log in to the service. The username is admin, and the password is auto-generated and saved in a secret called argocd-initial-admin-secret. We can get the password by running the following command:
kubectl get secret argocd-initial-admin-secret -n argocd -o jsonpath='{.data.password}' | base64 -d && echo
This will decode the base64-encoded password value and print it to the console. Once we have the password, we can log in to the Argo CD UI and start deploying our applications.
Deploying Applications with Argo CD
To deploy our applications with Argo CD, we’ll need to create a configuration file that tells Argo CD how to connect to the Git repository where the configuration files are hosted. We’ll call this file application.yaml.
The configuration is straightforward. First, we have the apiVersion and kind fields, which are familiar fields from Kubernetes. For custom resource definitions, the apiVersion is from the project itself, so we’ll use argoproj.io/v1alpha1. The kind is Application.
Next, we have the metadata field, which contains the name and namespace of the application. We’ll call this my-app-argocd and put it in the argocd namespace.
Finally, we have the spec field, which is specific to this application. We’ll set the project field to the default project and configure two things: the Git repository that Argo CD will connect to and sync, and the destination or cluster where Argo CD will apply the definitions it found in the Git repository.
Here’s what the configuration file looks like:
apiVersion: argoproj.io/v1alpha1 kind: Application metadata: name: my-app-argocd namespace: argocd spec: project: default source: repoURL: <git-repository-url> targetRevision: HEAD path: dev destination: server: https://kubernetes.default.svc namespace: default
Note that we’re using the <git-repository-url> placeholder. You’ll need to replace this with the URL of your Git repository.
Once we’ve created this configuration file, we can apply it to Argo CD by running the following command:
kubectl apply -f application.yaml
Argo CD will automatically detect the new configuration file and start syncing the application. You can monitor the progress of the deployment
Once we have our configuration file set up, we can use kubectl to apply it:
kubectl apply -f dev/application.yaml -n argocd
This will create our application in the argocd namespace.
Now, if we go back to the Argo CD UI and refresh the page, we should see our application listed. We can click on it to see more details.
From here, we can see that Argo CD has synced our application with the Git repository and found the configuration files in the dev folder.
We can also see that Argo CD has deployed our application to the Kubernetes cluster, as evidenced by the “Sync Status” and “Health Status” sections.
At this point, we have successfully set up Argo CD to manage our application deployments. Any changes we make to our configuration files in the Git repository will automatically be synced and deployed to the Kubernetes cluster.
Conclusion
Argo CD is a powerful tool for managing Kubernetes applications and deployments. It provides an intuitive UI and a powerful CLI, as well as integrations with Git repositories and other tools.
In this article, we walked through the process of setting up Argo CD on a Kubernetes cluster, using a sample application as an example. We covered the basic concepts of Argo CD, such as applications, repositories, and destinations, and demonstrated how to configure and deploy an application using Argo CD.
We hope that this article has been helpful in getting you started with Argo CD, and that you are now able to use it to manage your own Kubernetes deployments.
